Honoring Our Fallen Heroes on Memorial Day

Memorial Day is the day in American where we remember and honor the dead, and that may not seem like it has anything to do with surviving to thriving or creating healthy relationships, but when I talk about having healthy relationships, I don’t just mean with your lover. I mean with everything - the land, animals, plants, the spirit world, the dead, everything. Everything is energy. Everything is you. You are everything. So, to have a holistic, meaningful, connected life, to me that means that I have a relationship with everything. And Memorial Day for me is a time to remember and embrace my relationship to our dead warriors, the energy of sacrifice, war, horror, survival, triumph, all of that. Life’s not all pretty, but I want to live fully and that means embracing it in all its hues.

Hi, I’m Laura Giles, your host of Surviving to Thriving and each week, that’s exactly what we talk about - moving from Surviving to Thriving by creating happy, fulfilling relationships with all that is. It’s about living a relational life that is mindful, conscious, and connected. I believe that most mental health issues, social issues, and interpersonal issues come from a lack of belonging, and we can fix that. So, let’s get started.

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I don’t think I’ve ever done this before, but i want to give a trigger warning. If you are tender hearted, sensitive, or have war related PTSD, this might not be the podcast for you. Skip this one and see me next week. Cool? 

Alright, I typically honor Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day by going to a battlefield. Veteran’s Day is about honoring the living people who served in the military. Memorial Day is about honoring the dead, but since the last person in my family who died in service was my great-uncle who I never met, and the only other person I know in my family line who served in an American conflict goes back to the American Revolution, and I’ve never served, war has been on the periphery of my life. This could mean “out of sight, out of mind” and I spend the day at a pool party or picnic, but I’ll tell you why that’s not how it goes for me.

The first battlefield I ever went to as an adult was Wounded Knee. Wounded Knee is on Lakota land. The Lakota were one of the last Native American tribes forced onto reservations, and Wounded Knee was either the last or one of the last battles with the Lakota. 

It was December 1890, so I hundred and thirty years ago. The Lakota had signed treaties and had lost their independence and culture. They were dependent upon the US government for food, blankets, and supplies that were always late and never what was promised. Smallpox had swept through killing lots of people. The buffalo, which provided everything the Lakota needed to sustain life, were hunted almost to extinction. People were dying. And the United States broke their treaties by taking the back the Black Hills, which was sacred to the Lakota. This is where their creation myth starts. So, the original 60 million acres that they were restricted to shrunk down to 21.7 million, then 12.7 million.

The Lakota went from being a nomadic people to being forced to farm crops and livestock. They weren’t farmers and didn’t know how to farm. And the land wasn’t productive, so it wasn’t a plan that set them up for success.

Two decades earlier, two Northern Paiute medicine men had a vision that the Creator was punishing the Natives for abandoning their ways. He prophesied that the dead would come back, conquer the invaders, and restore the land, food, and way of life. Obviously this gave people hope and news spread fast and reached the Lakota. And when some people danced and fell into a trance, they received dances and songs from the spirit world to hasten this end. They were told that if they wore their ghost shirts, bullets would bounce off them.

When the Americans heard this, they got cagey. One of the ways they hoped to obliterate Native Americans was outlawing their culture. So, they weren’t allowed to speak their own language or wear traditional clothing. If you go to a pow wow, you will see fry bread vendors, and people think of this as Indian food, but it wasn’t. Fry bread was something that evolved out of necessity. All they were given to eat was flour, lard, coffee, sugar, and things like that. They created fry bread because it was all they had to eat.

Spiritual practices were banned. Their children were taken away and educated as Christians and taught English so kids couldn’t speak to their parents. So the Ghost Dance was not permitted either, but they did dance. Some of the federal agents tolerated the practice. Some were afraid that it would embolden the natives or perhaps that it would result in god punishing the Americans and burying them under 30 feet of soil. 

The Army wanted to diffuse the movement by relocating some of the leaders of the movement. So, on December 15, the reservation agent, Major James McLaughlin ordered 43 tribal policemen to Sitting Bull’s cabin. He was peaceful and compliant, but his followers protested and a fight broke out that killed nine Hunkpapa natives, including Sitting Bull. 

This created a powder keg situation, needless to say. Some of the Lakota wanted to attack. Some wanted to negotiate for a return of their traditions. It helps if you have been there to put things into perspective, but the reservation is huge. One of the peaceful leaders, Big Foot, who was not a Ghost Dancer, but was on the Bureau of Indian affairs list of hostiles, he was leading 350 of his people to the Pine Ridge reservation, and the Army saw it as a hostile move and ordered the cavalry to intercept them and take their weapons.

They did intercept them at Wounded Knee creek on December 28. Big Foot saw the scouts and told them they would surrender peacefully. The next day, they began to confiscate the weapons. Now, this was unprecedented. It was expected that they’d give a few weapons, but taking them all was essentially a threat to life because it meant that they couldn’t hunt for food, and this was a culture that was largely hunter gatherer. The Army became more and more aggressive in their search and some of the Lakota became angry. 

One of the native men began to Ghost Dance in an attempt to get others to join him. They believed that bullets would not touch them. His dancing became more trancelike and frenzied, and this was freaking the calvary out. When a deaf native refused to give up his gun, a tussle ensued and the gun went off. It was all over after that. The 7th cavalry opened fire. Since most of the natives had already given up their weapons, they were sitting ducks. They opened fire with their Hotchkiss guns and mowed everyone down - men, women, and children. It was all over in a few minutes.

Later that day, a blizzard came. Those who were wounded died of exposure. The dead were frozen in grotesque poses that were later photographed. The corpses were scattered for two miles because those were trying to flee were chased down. Four days later when the blizzard passed, a Lakota doctor went searching for survivors. They were only ten.

20 cavalrymen later received a Congressional Medal of Honor for their participation in this massacre. It’s the highest honor that a service member can receive. 

So, I’m on this land and a Lakota guide is telling me this story in a matter-of-fact tone. Kind of like I just told it to you. That’s the way a lot of them talk. Kind of deadpan, but there is a lot of humor and joy in them as well. The guide is one of the descendants of the survivors, so I can’t wrap my head around how he could be just telling me this like he was talking about going to get some coffee.

He finishes his story and gives us time to explore the land. You can see the graveyard up on the top of the hill, so I head up there. The cemetery is simple. Many wooden crosses illustrate the surviving family’s poverty, but the many colorful flowers, cards, and offerings showed that there was no shortage of love. There is a mass grave of about 150 of the Wounded Knee victims there, but still the cemetery is a place of peace.

I thought the massacre happened at the gravesite, but it became very obvious as I walked down hill that that was not the case. As I walked closer to the field at the foot of the hill, I could feel wave after wave of the most intense grief. The land absolutely wept with sorrow. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stand upright. It wasn’t hitting me like a velvet hammer. It was soft, but powerful. 

We are energy. The land is energy. Our acts are energy, and the energy of that cruelty, that loss, was here in the soil. The people were gunned down with Hotchkiss guns. Lakota medicine man, Black Elk said, “I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and it was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream… the nations hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.” 

I go to places like this to remember. To honor those who died senselessly, so that if I have a voice, I can use it to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. I speak about because I believe that our warrior’s stories need to be told. 

There is a saying that goes, “When you kill someone, you dig two graves. One for the slain, the other for the part of the killer that dies, never to be reborn again.” That’s what our warriors bear on our behalf. It’s a lot to ask. If we know what we ask of them, if we know the cost to ourselves, it becomes hard to support war. I think that’s how it should be, don’t you?

If I am in the position of having to defend myself or am feeling like I need to attack, if I remember what it leads to, I believe I can make wiser decisions. I don’t have any Lakota ancestry or any ancestors on the American side, but I am both the Lakota and the Army. We are Earthlings and this is our legacy. It’s our responsibility to know our legacy, learn from it, and use that experience to make the future a better one for ourselves and the generations that follow.

In my opinion, battlefields are holy ground. They are places of remembrance. i don’t think any sensitive person can go to one and not feel the horror of it. 

I once took a spiritual tour to Scotland, and one of the places we stopped was the Culloden battlefield. It wasn’t originally on the itinerary, but the guide suggested it, and we had time. It was very near the standing stones that are in The Outlander - Clava Cairn - that we wanted to see, so why not? 

Culloden is very much like Wounded Knee. It’s where the Scottish highland lifestyle died. The same thing happened to the highlanders that happened to the Native Americans. The language was outlawed and the culture was destroyed. It’s a tactic to make the opposition disappear by absorbing them into the dominant culture. Fortunately, like with the Native Americans, it hasn’t succeeded.

But today it looks pretty peaceful when you go there. It’s a big field with a gift shop at the entrance. There is a path that you can walk around, and just like Wounded Knee, it all seems pretty placid until you get to this little monument. It’s not the big one. It’s just a rock in the ground. I felt like I had been gut punched. I couldn’t keep walking. The pain was heartbreaking. I couldn’t breathe. 

There was nothing that could make me feel the loss of war, of a lifestyle, and of just people that you love the way that that feeling did. It knocked me over.

And I think that is something that we need to be reminded of. We need to have these experiences that go deep into the bone so that we remember. We need to have a relationship with our soldiers, our dead warriors, with war, with peace, with life. We need to remember that killing tears the soul in pieces. It makes us fragmented.

As the recipients of that sacrifice, we have an obligation to support our warriors, to hear their stories, and to not have policies that promote senseless war. War is a lack of boundaries and empathy on a ridiculous scale. When we take care of boundaries and empathy on a personal scale, it doesn’t have to get so out of control. 

Fear causes war. A lack of forgiveness and change creates war. Look at the Middle East. They’ve been at war for thousands of years. If you don’t want the next thousand years to be like that, if you don’t want your children to be there, we have to have a change of heart.

It starts by remembering. What’s the saying, “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it?” Haven’t we had enough war already? 

I live in battlefield country. Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy. There are a lot of battlefields between Fredericksburg and Petersburg. One of my favorites is Cold Harbor. I know, I’m a dark one. Blame it on all that Scorpio in my astrological chart, but Cold Harbor has one of the most intense energies of any battlefield I’ve ever been on. 

A lot of these battlefields have signs up that tell you what happened where. These guys just sat there, literally feet away from each other, blasting each other for pieces for days. A creek runs through there and the creek ran red with blood. In two weeks or fighting, over 17,000 men were slaughtered. 7,000 of those died on June 3rd in a 30 minute pre-dawn assault. It was just insane, and you can literally feel it in the air still today.

If you go there during the anniversary of the fighting, especially if you are there during a re-enactment, it riles up the restless dead. I have clients that live along the battlefield who suffer with paranormal PTSD because they are bothered all the time with nightmares, visitations, and attachments. What we don’t resolve continues to live on. Death does not put an end to energy. If you don’t purify and make amends, it remains in the heart and in the environment and will continue to pollute the people who live there now.

This is why I have participated in clearings here at Cold Harbor. The dead lay unburied for four years. The cemetery there is one of the most activated places that I’ve been. 

Chung Ek, the killing fields of Cambodia, is the same. It’s a field. It doesn’t look like anything in particular, but it’s a mass grave of people who were tortured and killed under the Pol Pot regime. The graves are so shallow that you can see the clothing of the dead sticking up out of the ground. They are literally right beneath your feet. The horror of the way they died hangs in the air like a silent scream.

I’m sorry, not sorry, that I am sharing this today, because the story has to be told. If it is forgotten, it will be repeated. When the next Hitler comes, those of us with a daddy complex will see him or her as a savior because we fear the big boogie man, and let him lead us to another slaughter. I am not speaking about anyone or any event in particular, so don’t take this as a political speech. It’s not. I’m just saying that it’s up to us to remember the horror, our humanity, and love so that we don’t walk down this path again.

The battlefield I visited last year, I don’t remember the name of it, had plaques up telling the story of the battlefield, and on one it told of a 25 year old general who was in command because he was the most senior person there. I remember myself at 25. There wasn’t a whole lot that I was in command of. Can you imagine the stain on his soul for having to do that? Let’s not ask that of our sons and daughters, okay? 

And if you are on the receiving end of a horror that you or your ancestors endured, do the work to heal that. Nobody can do that for you. The hero’s journey can’t be outsourced. You have to walk that walk. Our unresolved wounds keep us from living with an open heart and in a giving space. We all have war in our ancestral history, our past lives, and maybe current life. Heal. Forgive. 

I am a healer. When I was at Wounded Knee, I was mentally thinking about all the things I could do to help heal the land and the people, then I stopped myself because I can’t do that for them. They have to do that for themselves, and they are doing it. They are reclaiming their language. They have reintroduced the bison to the land. Some of them are reclaiming their traditions, and it is giving them a sense of power and pride that was lost a hundred and thirty years ago. Don’t let it wait that long. Reclaim your power. Forgive. Love.

Memorial Day is about remembering those who died in conflict. In my opinion, it’s a sacred act to defend your people, your land, values, and way of life. It’s the ultimate sacrifice. And all too often, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about fear, greed, and power, and our soldiers are used as pawns. They aren’t valued as humans. The people they kill aren’t valued as humans. 

So today, I am asking you to remember. Go to a battlefield. I know it’s hard. But go. Clean a grave. Learn your history. Listen to a veteran. Watch a parade. Enjoy your picnic even and think about the freedom that you have because someone made that sacrifice for you. Freedom isn’t free. It’s paid for with blood. 

Our leaders and voters always need to have this in their minds and think about it when we make choices about the lives of our military men and women. When we belong to each other, we don’t do things to hurt each other. That’s why I am here - to encourage us to connect and spread the love. I don’t know what a world could look like if there were just 10% more love, but I have hope that we can get there one person at a time.

It’s not cool to think about death and war, but we have to if we want to have a peaceful future. If you would like some company along your journey to living a connected life, check out my free online community in the show notes. I’d love to have you join us there. See you next week, and thanks for tuning in.